By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

'Markedness' is a central notion in linguistic theory. This book is thefirst to provide a comprehensive survey of markedness relations acrossvarious grammatical categories, in a sample of closely-related speechvarieties. It is based on a sample of over 100 dialects of Romani,collected and processed via the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) Database - acomparative grammatical outline in electronic form, constructed by theauthors between 2000-2004. Romani dialects provide an exciting sample oflanguage change phenomena: they are oral languages, which have beenseparated and dispersed from some six centuries, and are strongly shaped bythe influence of diverse contact languages.

The book takes a typological approach to markedness, viewing it as ahierarchy among values that is conditioned by conceptual and cognitiveuniversals. But it introduces a functional-pragmatic notion of markedness,as a grammaticalised strategy employed in order to priositise information.In what is referred to as 'dynamic', such prioritisation is influenced byan interplay of factors: the values within a category and the conceptualnotions that they represent, the grammatical structure onto which thecategory values are mapped, and the kind of strategy that is applied inorder to prioritise certain value. Consequently, the book contains athorough survey of some 20 categories (e.g Person, Number, Gender, and soon) and their formal representation in various grammatical structuresacross the sample. The various accepted criteria for markedness (e.g.Complexity, Differentiation, Erosion, and so on) are examinedsystematically in relation to the values of each and every category, foreach relevant structure. The outcome is a novel picture of how differentmarkedness criteria may cluster for certain categories, giving a concretereality to the hitherto rather vague notion of markedness. Borrowing andits relation to markedness is also examined, offering new insights into themotivations behind contact-induced change.